Cheech and Chong's Nice Dreams |
It’s hard to dislike Cheech and Chong. Dumb, scruffy, and lovable, they come on less like a comedy team than like a pair of mongrels, begging to be taken home, coddled, and fed some hash-spiked Alpo. When Cheech and Chong sit in one of their fur-lined vehicles, exchanging ethnic bow-wows and puffing on a joint the size of a banana, they’re blissfully unaware of the Real World. They’re the last — and kookiest — remnants of the ‘60s — California-dazed lowlifes, who turn the whole idea of a drugged-out counterculture into something comically harmless.Unfortunately, what they don’t know about making movies could fill volumes. Their latest effort, Cheech and Chong’s Nice Dreams, is such a bewildering mess that it could be viewed as a Hollywood home movie. By their own admission, Cheech and Chong typically arrived on the set of Nice Dreams with no script and no real idea of what they were going to do. They just made the film up as they went along. And it shows. There are more than a few moments when it seems as if the duo were trying to emulate Andy Warhol. Characters scream and bellow at each other, and scenes drag on and on, as if there hadn’t been anyone around who was straight enough to yell “Cut!” And the plot — well, suffice it to say that even the spaciest potheads in the audience are likely to find Nice Dreams’ lack of narrative coherence a little baffling.
In its own offbeat way, the duo’s previous effort – Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie – was an authentic character comedy; like Up in Smoke, it got you involved in the lazy lives of its heroes and then coasted along on their charm. Living in a tumbledown shack that looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a decade, half-heartedly pining for the big score that would put them on Easy Street, the two were like live-action versions of the old underground-comic characters, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Indeed , it wasn’t hard to imagine Cheech and Chong living comfortably with the Freak Brothers’ motto: “Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.”
In Nice Dreams, the scuzzy antics of Cheech and Chong take a back seat to a gallery of LA eccentrics: a psychotic punker, a neanderthal Hell’s Angel , a luscious nympho, and a police detective (Stacy Keach) who watches porno loops in the privacy of his office and (after inhaling some killer weed) gradually begins to turn into a lizard. These characters are given about two good bits apiece and a half-hour’s worth of screen time in which to repeat them. Cheech and Chong themselves are as dumb, scruffy, and lovable as ever, though aside from riding around in an ice-cream truck bedecked with a smiling plastic head, they haven’t given themselves any scenes that showcase their talent for laidback surrealism. Cheech, as always, is the cut-up, a daffy Chicano jester whose gap-toothed grin is like a badge of easy living. It was Cheech who donned a pink tutu for the final punk-rock rave up in Up in Smoke and, in Next Movie, delivered a sublimely cretinous entitled “Mexican Ameh-ree-cans.” Here, his talents are wasted on such stunts as hanging nude from an elevator while crowds of old ladies shriek in horror. Chong, the bearded straight man, is even more laconic than usual; perhaps the chore of directing the film sapped his energy, though it’s not exactly clear what that chore entailed. The one truly boffo bit is a scene in which Cheech, tied into a strait jacket, attempts to scratch his testicles.
